When Emmy Blue’s father announces his plan to move his family to the mountains of Colorado, Emmy looks forward to the adventure. The Wild West sounds much more exciting than becoming a lady and learning to quilt. However, she learns that adventure also means sacrifice and hard work. After leaving friends, family, and her pet cat, Emmy starts a new life on the trail to Golden, Colorado.
On the wagon train, Emmy and her family experience hardships and strengthening experiences. They make friends and even some enemies in their journey to a new land. At the request of her grandmother, Emmy is forced to learn to quilt as she travels, but her quilting soon becomes soothing and a way to record memories. In her first children’s novel, Sandra Dallas gives a realistic and detailed view of wagon train life. She also tells an interesting story of a child finding her place in a new world.
I recommend it for 10 and up, because there is some discussion spouse abuse. Nothing is discussed in detail and it is age appropriate, but it can be a hard subject and might take a more mature reader to understand.
Recommended for ages 10 and up.
This is not a young adult novel and not fully historical fiction. However, the heroine is seventeen and this regency romance is so much more appropriate than most popular young adult fiction these days, I feel it is appropriate to include on my site. 
Joseph Michtom lives in Brooklyn with his family during the summer of 1903. His only wish is to visit the new amusement park at Coney Island, but his family is too busy. As Russian immigrants, Joseph’s family struggled with the others until his father sold the first stuffed toy bear. Now the family can’t keep up with the demand for toy bears and Joseph feels his childhood being sucked away by their good fortune.
Melkorka is an Irish princess living a privileged life in medieval Ireland. When she and her young sister are kidnapped by a Russian slave ship, Melkorka is plunged into the unfamiliar struggles of poverty and servitude. In her grief, she takes a vow of silence, but soon learns her silence is the key to survival. Her captors and masters are fascinated by her silence, giving her more power than a typical slave.
Esperanza enjoys an indulged life on her family’s ranch in Aguascalientes, Mexico. Surrounded by wealth and loving family, she has little understanding of the servants and ranch hands around her. An unexpected tragedy robs Esperanza of her comfort and forces her and her Mama to flee to California. There they settle in a camp for migrant farm workers and are forced to endure the hard physical labor and financial struggles of their new position.
In late winter 1858, Early Whitcomb and his family were struggling to save their farm. After a dry year and poor harvest, their savings were barely enough to pay the mortgage. Threats from the bank were becoming more severe and financial ruin seemed inevitable. About this time, the farmers began to hear rumors of gold found out West at Pike’s Peak. Early’s Uncle Jesse is caught up in the gold fever and is sure that digging for gold will solve all their problems.
Stosh has the unique ability to travel through time using only a baseball card. He holds a card from the year he wants to visit, and suddenly he is there. In Roberto & Me, Stosh travels to 1969 to meet baseball star and humanitarian Roberto Clemente. His goal is to warn Roberto not to take the tragic plane flight that cut his life so short. However, Stosh soon learns changing the future is more difficult than he expected.
I was immediately captivated by the title Al Capone Does My Shirts. However, while the title is an excellent fit for the story, it led me to expect an entirely different type of book. I expected kids mixed up with gangsters or some other sort of hilarity. Instead, Al Capone Does My Shirts is a much deeper and more profound work of historical fiction placed against the backdrop of the Depression and Alcatraz. This book was assigned to my ten-year-old daughter and I think she can appreciate it, but readers of her age would need a background on Alcatraz, Al Capone, and the culture of the time period.
